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Peter Howell reviews the latest film written by Aaron Sorkin and directed by Danny Boyle.

Steve Jobs is an imperfect creation, like the late Apple icon it furiously sketches and the evolving computers it celebrates. The film is a subjective portrait, not a photograph, as screenwriter Aaron Sorkin candidly admits.

Yet it entertains and enlightens, and it’s bang on in showing how great ideas are born not through compromise but through vision and determination.

Sorkin and director Danny Boyle narrowly define their narrative while also freestyling dialogue and history. They merely dip into Walter Isaacson’s authorized biography of the same title and they employ a lead actor, Michael Fassbender, who resembles Jobs only in intelligence and energy.

The three-act film turns on the backstage drama at three signal life events for Jobs, all of them computer launches: the Macintosh in 1984, the NeXTcube in 1988 and the iMac in 1998. The movie’s visual textures join the evolution: first in 16mm, then in 35mm and finally in digital format.

Jobs is seen not as the bearded and barefoot hippie of his earliest 1970s media incarnation but as the bespoke capitalist and bespectacled patrician he becomes in later transformations.

Missing is any real sense of humour, appreciation for the friends and workers he pushes to the breaking point, or love for the legions of fans who buy the products he’s forever tweaking.

“The very nature of people is something to overcome,” Jobs sneers.

Fassbender’s acidic Jobs is thus the most unlovable version of the late tech titan to hit public screens, following two previous dramatic treatments and a recent Alex Gibney documentary.

Yet he’s also the most fascinating, a figure of Shakespearian rage and contradictions. Credit Fassbender’s “insanely great” performance, to use a favourite Jobs expression, but also an excellent supporting cast.

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Kate Winslet is a prod to conscience in the role of Macintosh marketing chief Joanna Hoffman, one of the few people whom Jobs will listen to. Women rarely get the spotlight in Apple history accounts; Winslet corrects this with awards-beckoning strength and grace.

Also worthy of applause: Seth Rogen as neglected Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak; Jeff Daniels as father figure turned adversary John Sculley; Michael Stuhlbarg as beleaguered engineer Andy Hertzfeld; Katherine Waterston as ex-girlfriend Chrisann Brennan, mother of the child Jobs initially disavowed; and Perla Haney-Jardine as the teenaged Lisa, one of several actresses playing the daughter Jobs named a computer after but struggled to claim as family.

Sorkin delves into Jobs’s troubled past as an adopted child abandoned at birth who in turn rejects his own progeny. A screenplay long on talk finally nails the man’s essential ambivalence in just three short words of confession: “I’m poorly made.”

Through the constant refining and rhapsodizing of his machines, Jobs sought to create the perfection he felt nature had denied him.

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